Wire guides are used in a variety of medical procedures involving the vasculature of a patient.
Wire guides can be described as elongated flexible members used to provide a path along which another medical device can be moved. For example, the path provided by the wire guide can be used to navigate a medical device, such as a catheter, through a body vessel.
The catheter and wire guide are often highly flexible in order to traverse the tortuous body passages en route to the treatment location. Such wire guides are advanced through the circulatory system by applying a torque to the proximal end of the wire guide at an external site. In this example, the wire guide has sufficient column strength to allow the distal end of the wire guide to be manipulated from the external access site.
Current catheter wire guide designs attempt to meet these requirements by incorporating a number of features designed to increase the flexibility of the distal end of the wire guide while maintaining torsional rigidity. Such designs may include a tapered distal end region of the wire guide.
However, such tapering may reduce the torsional rigidity of the wire guide, resulting in additional manufacturing steps which may be more time consuming or complex.